It’s taken years of hard work and realisations, but Jamie Kuijpers and the crew at Basket Case are taking the lead on recreating a full Green Day experience for fans, taking fans back to the 90’s with a tribute to Dookie on its 25th anniversary year.

Playing for one night only on March 10, Basket Case – The Australian Green Day Show presents Dookie Live is set to rock the Arkaba and you can win tickets!

The idea of performing Green Day tributes hatched out of, not just a passion for the music, but the physical attributes that Jamie himself held.

“If you’ve seen any of the footage of us, I bear quite a resemblance to Billy Joe,” Jamie laughs.

It wasn’t until years of fans pointing it out to him that he and Troi Tyrrell (guitar and backing vocals) decided to roll with it.

“I played in an acoustic duo with Troi, and we’d often wear red ties. It wasn’t particularly a Green Day thing. We just went to one corporate thing back in 2011/2012 and the theme of the night was red ties. So we did that and then there were photos, and we used them for our promo photos a lot, so we started wearing red ties whenever we did corporate functions,” he says.

Dress code or not it, seemed that the idea kept following Jamie around, who humbly takes it in his stride.

“What’s funny is myself and my wife can’t see it. We just don’t see it because we know ourselves and I don’t see that resemblance. I wear glasses normally and I was at a gig for Christmas, so I wasn’t even in black, I was wearing a tie that wasn’t a red tie, I was dressed completely differently- with glasses on, and at the end of it, people still came up and were like, ‘Oh hey can we get a selfie with you?’ and I just didn’t dress any way to resemble him that day,” he says.

It was this that created the idea – in the dead of an afternoon at a wedding expo – that he and Troi decided to take the plunge.

“We were chatting to the folks on the stand next door and, and they pointed out, ‘Man you know, you really look like the guy from Green Day’, and I was thinking God I hear this a lot and so we just started playing Green Day songs- because we knew a few- and then we started thinking back to the 90s and what we used to play, and we just started ripping out as many as we could,” Jamie says.

“Anyway we packed up at the end of that night and I looked at Troi and said, ‘We should do it’ and Troi said, ‘We’ve been saying that for a year now, let’s actually do it!’ And so, that was it. We found a bass player, we found a drummer that was suitable, we asked them and it kind of just rolled on from there. So that’s how it actually came about, just people continually seeing me as ‘that guy.”

When asked if being compared to “that guy from Green Day” got on his nerves, Jamie chuckles, “Hey I’ll take the blessing side of it, I have no problem at all, I don’t mind!”.

Fast forward to 2019 and Green Day fans are in for a real treat at Adelaide Fringe.

“The whole idea of Basket Case originally was to recreate a live Green Day concert. Throughout the last couple of years playing the pub scene, (and a lot of clubs and the places we’ve played) we’ve often had to do it in either two or three sets because the pubs need time for people to have breaks to drink at the bar and all that kind of stuff. So, the period of time has never been a full concert,” Jamie says.

Dookie has been out for 25 years, and with Green Day themselves still an integral part of the punk/rock scene, their shows have been known to be an intense concert experience, which Jamie and the boys want to recreate.

“We thought why not actually put together a concert as if Green Day were in town playing for 2-21/2 hours, and throw that Dookie album right in the centre like they did back in 2013 when they played the festival in England. So, the idea of this show is to really recreate that, that full concert experience from start to finish, including the intro tracks, including the bunny suit, including the video screen, just having a good go at that full concert Green Day experience,” he says.

And knowing Green Day fans, Jamie says there will be a lot to enjoy about this show.

“You can stand there and literally just look at the faces in front of you and they’re Green Day fans as well and they know every word and it doesn’t matter if it’s a B side that no one has ever heard on the radio in their lives, these people know those songs because they’re fans, and that is the coolest thing to be able to share that love of the music and that love of what the Green Day band themselves are about,” he says. “I guess what I enjoy about doing this show is not only that I’m playing with friends and doing what I love, but I have been a Green Day fan since the 90’s. I can still remember playing in cover bands in the mid-to-late 90’s and pulling out ‘Basket case’ and ‘When I come around’ and songs like that when Dookie came out.”

“My favourite song to play right now is ‘Letterbomb’, which is from the American Idiot album. I really enjoy playing that song. Probably my other favourite is, if you’ve ever checked out American Idiot the Musical, there is a cast version of ’21 Guns’, which is a great one,” he says.

If you’re keen to know more and give the boys a listen, see Basket Case – The Australian Green Day show at Top of the Ark at Arkaba Hotel this March. Get your tickets HERE.

To win tickets to this great show by Adelaide artists, simply tell us what your favourite Green Day song is in the comments below.